Oreo owner Mondelez’s plans for the cookie-less world

Mondelez welcomes Google and Apple’s efforts to eliminate cookies that track users, saying it supports consumer privacy.

It acknowledges that, as an advertiser, this does however present challenges, even though it believes the adtech industry has been adaptable and innovative.

“Mondelez International fully supports consumer privacy and the efforts made by regulatory bodies and technology companies to ensure concerns are being addressed,” Anuj Dahiya, the global digital head at Mondelez International, tells The Drum.

“Some of the new technologies we are considering include semantic-based contextual targeting and tools that allow us to correlate privacy-friendly attention and engagement metrics with brand lift, and to optimize the sites and apps we leverage in our private marketplaces.”

One of the technologies Mondelez is using to plug visibility gaps due to privacy regulations and the deprecation of cookies and take meaningful action to influence campaign performance is DoubleVerify’s Authentic Attention.

Jordan Khoo, the managing director for the Asia Pacific at DoubleVerify, says Mondelez wants to understand campaign performance, with existing measurement solutions continuing to be a challenge.

However, current tools are either precise but impacted by privacy regulations, or privacy-safe and lack speed and granularity. These gaps hamper Mondelez’s ability to take meaningful action to impact campaign performance.

“DV’s Authentic Attention is privacy-friendly – meaning it does not rely on cookies,” says Khoo. ”It goes beyond traditional KPIs such as viewability and clicks to provide granular insights by analyzing over 50 data points in real-time across user presence, user engagement, and ad presentation

“With Authentic Attention, we were able to augment existing solutions and successfully balance precision and privacy while managing more diverse planning and optimization use cases. This is incredibly important as privacy concerns and regulations change the way advertisers target and measure performance.”

After using data from Authentic Attention to measure campaign outcomes, Mondelez uncovered some key learnings around ad exposure as the tech can evaluate an ad’s presentation, quantifying its intensity and prominence through metrics like viewable time, the share of the screen, video presentation, audibility, and more.

“When we used Authentic Attention on a cross-channel display campaign for one of our popular snack brands, we found that high-exposure impressions were incredibly valuable for our campaigns, correlating with increases across key metric,” explains Dahiya.

“This includes a 9% point increase in favorability overall, an 8% lift in consideration overall, and a 5% boost in purchase intent with our primary demographic.”

With Google delaying cookie extinction till 2023, Khoo says while this news does give everyone more time to prepare, he stresses that it is not the time to turn down the urgency because if anything, now is the time to step up innovation and testing.

He also believes it is still early days for initiatives like Unified ID 2.0 as it remains to be seen which, if any, will be the “silver bullet” to replace the cookie. This means advertisers and publishers alike are watching to see how various technologies take shape, and how effective they will be in measuring audiences, behaviors, attribution, demographics, intent and so forth.

“It will take intense engineering effort across the industry to adapt to these new changes and for companies to find alternative solutions. Even though DV provides solutions that do not rely on cookies, it has challenged us to think about the data we do collect, and how that can be used to help fill in the gap. Our recently launched dynamic contextual targeting is one such solution that seeks to address these needs,” he explains.

“The one thing we know for sure is that consumer privacy is here to stay and that any solutions advanced must be respectful of this shift. Necessity is the mother of invention; there is little doubt that new solutions will arise that serve the needs of advertisers to reach audiences and publisher demand for effective monetization of their inventory.”

For Mondelez, despite the delay, Dahiya says the vision is to build deeper and more relevant relationships with its consumers and brands. One of the foundational components is leveraging all things “data” and the need to “humanize” it, she says.

This is done by understanding what it collects, it can best activate, connect, and deliver true personalization

“With the ever-evolving digital ecosystem, proper management and activation of data will help us mine insights that create more meaningful consumer connections, reduce waste through better targeting and drive our brand’s effectiveness,” she adds.